Hollywood News: Weekend Box Office Recap

Glittery, angst-filled "neuvo-vamps" beat James Bond in the box office this weekend and Summit Entertainment has their first hit movie.

"Twilight" (our review here) exceeded projections for its opening weekend and on the strength of that, Summit Entertainment has decided to push their luck and announce a sequel to the film, called "New Moon."

However, I still believe that the numbers for this weekend are over-inflated by the crazed, love-struck teen girls (and a few guys who secretly wish they were) that make up the "Twilight" fan base. Now that all the fangeeks have had their fill of Robert Pattinson's pale-faced vamp, the real barometer for the franchise will be in the numbers it produces next weekend. And with Baz Luhrmann's "Austrailia" opening on Thanksgiving, I'm guessing Twilight's fall from its lofty perch is going to be a big one.

There's no question that the film had a huge open. It was the fourth highest opener for the month of November (behind three Harry Potter films) and the fourth largest opening for 2008, after The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones and Iron Man.

However, there is also no denying that without a creative marketing campaign that gave the illusion the film was going to be a big action flick, instead of a sappy, teenage romance, the numbers would have been a lot worse. Females made up 75% of the audience that saw the movie and 55% were under 25.

And then there is the fact that the numbers are just plain skewed by the fan base. Twilight's Friday numbers accounted for half of the entire weekend gross. This tells me that the majority of people that saw it were the fans and perhaps a few casual observers that had already seen everything else out there.

So, over-inflated numbers, a narrow demographic and a tentpole film opening the following week lead me to believe that this film is going to flop hard.

I still hold true to my estimate: Its going to see a 40% drop or better in next weekend's numbers.

Well NO ONE said it was as good as Iron Man or Dark Knight. So of course it will drop. I mean Harry Potter would have dropped if it was followed by Australia. Probably wouldn't drop as much as Twilight will drop, but I'm just going back to my main point that you're just sad it didn't fail! And you could have mentioned that Twilight was the biggest opening weekend for a woman director, ever. That's pretty cool!

That is pretty cool that that is what it is. I don't think the idea was that it was to fail opening weekend. Especially since reports were stating how it was sold out at certain theaters. It's not like another movie because it's Twilight, but the reason for stating Dark Knight and Iron Man is because they were this year and those are still fresh in those that like movie's minds. It's a context thing.

Meaning they had big openings and stayed afloat because they were good films. Twilight got a running start but the prediction is that that's all it will have. This up coming weekend will prove if that's true or not. We shall see. But everyone who wanted to see it has seen it and those who see it this weekend will be those that have seen it before and those that don't want to see what's opening this weekend.